Visible chain-of-thought does not reliably improve analytics code
Visible chain-of-thought is not a dependable accuracy boost for analytics code: its effect changes with the persona, target language, model setup, and internal-reasoning configuration. The study tests matched requests in SQL and Python pandas across visible reasoning formats, direct generation, and control prompts, then compares executable outputs. It finds no universal gain and no consistent advantage from asking a model to reason in the language it must produce.